After all of the posts I’ve read of yours at threadwatch, I was hoping that you had a blog of your own somewhere. Thanks for a link to it.

It’s hard not to look at something like this with two different hats on. One hat as a searcher who might be interested in finding information, and another as someone who studies search engines, and tries to understand how they do what they do.

Patents aren’t always revolutionary. More often, they are a way of taking something that exists, and attempting to add to it something else that other people aren’t doing. This seems to add at least two different things to the highlighting that a Google already does:

1. Some way to find information related to keywords, in addition to those keywords, or;

2. information that may match a user profile or that may be related to prior search history.

These aren’t giant steps, but they also aren’t things that people are doing now. And while big changes do spring up sometimes, often they come about from smaller changes over time.

I’m not convinced that this is the best way to collect user interests though. Maybe an Interestmap (pdf), combined with that profile and search history is the next big step.

Some of the stuff I think about when I see something like this is:

1. Will it happen, and when will we be able to use it?

2. Should it be something that we think about as we build pages? How might be take something like this into consideration?